It is sometimes said that while anti-capitalist and alternative globalization movements are clear on what we do not want, we are less clear on what we do want (socialism, anarchism, specifics). Certainly, recent movements have not been as effective as their predecessors (labor in the 1910s and ‘30s; the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s) in sustaining the sorts of practices – intellectual and material – that put into effect aspects of the alternative world we seek. My colleague Alan Sears attributes this current inability to a decline in what he calls “infrastructures of dissent” or what I prefer to call “infrastructures of resistance.” As anti-capitalist movements face possibilities of growth, as happened after Seattle in 1999, questions of organization and the relation of various activities to each other and to broader movements for social change can only become more urgent. Yet, the absence of durable organizations or institutions, formal or informal, rooted in working-class organizations and communities, makes for demoralization or a retreat into subculturalism, as has happened to many of the alternative globalization groups. We now face a pressing need to rebuild “infrastructures of resistance” that might sustain not only activists and organizers, but especially the poor and working-class people who are being disastrously impacted by the current crisis. ... read full story / add a comment

In recent years a variety of social movement and environmental commentators have devoted a great deal of energy to efforts which argue the demise of class struggle as a viable force for social change (See Eckersley, 1990; Bowles and Gintis, 1987; Bookchin, 1993; 1997). These writers argue that analyses of class struggle are unable to account for the plurality of expressions which hierarchy, domination and oppression take in advanced capitalist or what they prefer to call "postindustrial" societies (See Bookchin, 1980; 1986). They charge that class analyses render a one-dimensional portrayal of social relations. The result of this has been a broad practical and theoretical turn away from questions of class and especially class struggle. ... read full story / add a comment

As anarcha-feminists, when we think of "reproductive rights" we usually first think of a woman's right to choose when/where/how she has children in terms of her access to free, safe abortions and multiple birth control technologies. We might think of Emma Goldman standing on a soapbox risking arrest to talk to women about condoms, or of our sisters currently standing on the front lines doing clinic defense actions. But on the flip side of the same coin is the right to choose to have a child, and the access to health care and a safe environment to enable that choice. Creeping liberalism and racism manifest when the equation that abortion equals "individual choice free from state interference", or the interests of white, middle class women become the dominant interpretation of reproductive liberty. ... read full story / add a comment